State collapse Quotes

Either the State for ever, crushing individual and local life, taking over in all fields of human activity, bringing with it its wars and its domestic struggles for power, its palace revolutions which only replace one tyrant by another, and inevitably at the end of this development there is ... death! Or the destruction of States, and new life starting again in thousands of centers on the principle of the lively initiative of the individual and groups and that of free agreement.The choice lies with you!

As the result of two successful campaigns, of the employment of an enormous force, and of the expenditure of large sums of money, all that has yet been accomplished has been the disintegration of the [Afghan] State … and a condition of anarchy throughout the rest of the country.

We cannot build a viable state with a country that is disintegrating into small pieces.

ON the decline of the Roman power, about five centuries after Christ, the countries of Northern Europe were left almost destitute of a national government.

We saw Vietnam disintegrating before our eyes—at least the structure of the state disintegrating.

The chief threats to security come from failed states.

When there is no middle class, and the poor greatly exceed in number, troubles arise, and the state soon comes to an end.

The process to resolve post-Islamic State issues will be difficult and intense.

Libya is a failed state and becoming a launching pad for external operations, as is Sinai in Egypt.

Here are two ways by which every kind of government is destroyed; either by some accident that happens from without, or some evil that arises within itself. What the first will be is not always easy to foresee: but the latter is certain and determinate

We see an extensive program of dismantling state institutions... These are ingredients for catastrophe.

I don't want to be overly dramatic, but Iraq and Syria are gone, and they aren't coming back, at least not as centralized states.

Empires won by conquest have always fallen either by revolt within or by defeat by a rival.

There is not an example on record of any free state holding a province of the same extent and population without disastrous consequences. The nations conquered and held as a province have, in time, retaliated by destroying the liberty of their conquerors through the corrupting effect of extended patronage and irresponsible power.

The welfare state is collapsing all around us. There are people that realize that we can't go on this way, but I'm not sure how many people realize how close we are to the collapse of the U.S. financial system.

I don't have a fear and urgency feeling inside myself about the state of the world affairs and everything collapsing.

United States foreign policy, which includes national security, is literally disintegrating before our eyes.

When we toppled [Muammar] Gadhafi in Libya, I think that was a mistake. I think ISIS grew stronger, we had a failed state, and we were more at risk.

In late 2011 there is an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and it's the chronological description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya; jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and migrant crisis.

Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence.

There are people who haven't faced the reality of what has gone on in Iraq. They still think that the old central state is going to be put back together again. It's not going to happen in Kurdistan. It's not going to happen in the south. It's not going to happen in Baghdad.

After a regime is removed, however, it is dangerous to leave a security vacuum.

I think a failed state is the responsibility of the people who have made that state fail, and those are generally the people of that country.

When you get to the point where Baghdad is basically isolated, then what is the situation you have in the country? .. You have a country that Baghdad no longer controls; that whatever's happening inside Baghdad is almost irrelevant compared to what's going on in the rest of the country.

The downfall of civilized states tends to come not from the direct assaults of foes, but from internal decay combined with the consequences of exhaustion in war.